Planetarium

This week’s music tuesday will be spot on. On Saturday evening, fresh after my Paris trip, I took a trip to Muziekgebouw Eindhoven, a relatively new, shiny, fantastic concert hall with interesting programming. How interesting you say? Interesting enough to regularly book the likes of Nico Muhly, Sufjan Stevens and involves Bryce Dressner of The National to curate a concert series.

The concert hall also commissioned a pieces from these three, and out came Planetarium, a piece for seven trombones, a string quartet, keyboard, drums and guitar, it is a song-cycle of 11 songs dedicated to the solar system. It even includes Pluto, despite only being a dwarf planet.

Sufjan performing Planetarium - Source (flickr)

And indeed Muziekgebouw Eindhoven had managed on Saturday to gather a crowd of adventurous classical music fans and super-hipster Sufjan Stevens fans. The first half was for the former group, featuring Nico Muhly’s Diacritical Marks (2011) and Bryce Dressners Quintets performed by Navarra String Quartet, and the second half was more for the Sufjan fans.

And of course, things are on YouTube, so today’s music video will be a live one. Enjoy Mercury: